A Book Spy Review: ‘The Fix’ By David Baldacci

Following the events of last year’s The Last Mile, newly-hired FBI agent Amos Decker returns for his third outing in David Baldacci’s The Fix.

Amos Decker is not your average FBI agent. His size is the first thing that stands out, as Decker–a massive, hulk-like figure–still has the frame and body size that carried him to the NFL, where an injury ended his playing days.

The career-ending injury he suffered, though, caused some rare side effects. The crunching helmet-to-helmet blow induced both hyperthymesia and synesthesia, fancy words that mean Decker cannot forget anything at all, ever. Oh, and it’s changed the way he sees colors.

After a career as a police detective, a very personal case he worked on caught the eye of some people who made Decker an offer to use his unique skills and abilities to solve cold cases for the FBI as part of a newly-formed special task force. He accepted the job and took on his first case in The Last Mile, but this time he’s thrust into a murder investigation that even he can’t see any reason or motive for.

While walking down the sidewalk towards the FBI headquarters, Decker decided against stopping for a breakfast burrito and happened to return his gaze forward just in time to see a man pull a compact Beretta from his pocket and shoot a woman in the back of her head. Pulling his own firearm, Decker runs forward but is unable to do anything other than watch helplessly as the gunman turns his weapon on himself and pulls the trigger one final time.

The shooter was eventually identified as Walter Dabney, a former employee of the NSA who has since been working as a contractor with several government agencies, including the FBI. However, Decker and his team are unable to find any link between Dabney and the victim, Anne Meredith Berkshire, a substitute teacher who lived alone and had no close family members. An early working theory is that Dabney, who they confirmed was scheduled for a meeting inside the Hoover Building that morning, went off the deep end and decided to take a random person down with him.

Decker pokes numerous holes in the initial theory and begins searching for additional answers through his own unique methods. At the top of his list of unanswered questions is how a woman who makes a living as a substitute teacher is able to live in a three million dollar condo and drive a new Mercedes. More questions pop up when the team digs into Berkshire’s background and struggle to find anything on her beyond the last decade.

Just as the investigation heats up, Harper Brown, a no-nonsense DIA agent, requests a meeting with Decker and his boss, where she informs them that the murder is part of an ongoing investigation by the Defense Intelligence Agency and that they no longer need to spend any resources trying to solve the case themselves.

When pressed, Brown says that the murder is now a matter of national security, involving a scenario that could be bigger than 9/11.

Forgetting about a case and moving on isn’t what Decker does. In fact, it’s impossible for him. So, ignoring Brown’s orders, Decker and his team keep working the case and eventually uncover a massive conspiracy that quickly becomes much bigger than anything Amos Decker has tackled before.

David Baldacci, with more than 110 million copies of his books in print around the world, has finally hit his stride with this series. While Memory Manflashed potential and The Last Mile was a solid thriller, The Fix is without question the best Decker novel yet. While the story starts out with the feel of a crime or mystery novel, it suddenly turns into a high-octane political thriller filled with enough lies, conspiracy, and espionage to keep fans of both genres happy.